My Friend Dahmer is a portrait of the serial killer as a young man

Back in high school, cartoonist Derf Backderf knew this weird kid named Jeff. He was more than a bit of a freak, a weirdo on the edges of school society, but he had a screwy sense of humour that appealed to Backderf’s friends, lower-rung drama geeks who weren’t so far removed from Jeff’s decidedly out caste.

His go-to gag was the kind of casual sadism that could only appeal to teenage boys: whenever possible, Jeff would adopt a drawling speech impediment and copy the spasms of a cerebral-palsied interior decorator his mom knew. It was, by Backderf’s account, great fun for teenage laughs, but eventually Jeff’s screwed-up demeanour became too much, and the group resigned him to the outcast pile from whence he came.

All this would just be another slightly embarrassing tale of out of school if it wasn’t for one thing: Jeff’s last name is Dahmer.

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Anyone of a certain age won’t need any more than that. Jeffrey Dahmer is one in the line of 20th-century American monsters: Manson the swastika-d loon, Bundy the necrophiliac, Dahmer the cannibal. For Backderf, though, he is a memory that grew up into a collective nightmare, the weird kid from high school that actually did grow up into a serial killer.

“There are these flashes of surrealism that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” Backderf explains over the phone from his Cleveland studio, not far from the small Ohio town where he — and Dahmer — grew up. “There was this little tiny news item in the paper one day that said he’d gotten in trouble in prison, and it was the only time he’d ever gotten in trouble in prison. He was working … in some office or something, and there was a guy in the office who had a speech impediment, and Dahmer started imitating him — to make fun of him.

“Just like back in high school with the interior decorator with cerebral palsy that he imitated,” Backderf continues. “I saw that and it was like, ‘Holy s–t, he hasn’t changed a bit.’ ”

Dahmer’s high school exploits are at the centre of Backderf’s new graphic memoir, My Friend Dahmer which is, predictably, full of moments that will make the hair on your neck stand up. Far from a sensational account, it is a remarkably quotidian story: the Dahmer that emerges is an undeniably weird kid, a teenage alcoholic with a serious inability to relate to people, but not so far outside the norm of high school freaks as to give much hint as to what was to come.

“As far as the most out-of-control kids in the school, Dahmer may have been in the Top 5, but he wouldn’t have been in the Top 3,” Backderf explains. “He somehow managed to avoid detection, and that was of course his great skill, which got used to murderous ends.”

Dahmer’s ability stay below the radar curiously infects the story itself. As much as it focuses on him, it takes place in an environment that is instantly recognizable: the bizarre, confusing world of high school. It’s equal parts a portrait of the serial killer as a young man and a kind of skewed Freaks and Geeks.

“When I showed the first draft to [high school friends] Mike and Neil, they both responded the same way. They said, ‘This is the funniest book I’ve ever read,’ ” Backderf says. “And there’s only a handful of people who would ever respond that way, and it’s because they were looking in the background of the book. Behind there is this other storyline of these goofball kids messing around.”

Nevertheless, even in the way Backderf talks, you can still sense the tension between the troubled teen he knew and the monster Dahmer became, something that doesn’t seem fully resolved even after 20 years of careful thought about the story. Seeing the raw side of a media frenzy gave Backderf a pretty clear idea of what he didn’t want to do, though, and the book avoids any kind of easy characterization of either its subject or its style. My Friend Dahmer is basically a human story, albeit one tucked in a faraway corner of human experience.

“It stayed in sketchbooks for years, just because I didn’t know what to do with it. And I didn’t want to be part of the whole big, sleazy scandal-ridden frenzy that surrounded this guy,” he says. “There are some people who, for very valid reasons, don’t want to see this guy humanized. And I understand that, I get that. But nonetheless, at one time he was human. Everybody is.”